Excel shouldn’t serve as load-bearing infrastructure. Its files can’t be diffed, version controlled, or tested. Virginia’s failure shows the cost of doing so.
Tag Archives: budget
The final vote on 2008’s budget bill (SB30).
Remember in 2008, when every Republican senator in the General Assembly voted against the the budget bill, how they were labelled “obstructionists”? Yeah, me neither. →
Links for October 31st
PolitiFact: Occupy Providence sign says Goldman Sachs CEO earns in an hour what minimum wage worker earns in a yearPolitiFact ranks as "false" the claim that the CEO of Goldman Sachs earns as much in an hour as a minimum-wage worker makes in a year. Which seemed like good news, until I read their article. …
Links for October 20th
Planet Money: What If We Paid Off The Debt?Back in the good old days—before President George W. Bush, before fighting two wars, before September 11th, before a huge tax cut paid for with debt—it looked very much like the entire debt would be paid off by 2012. In producing the final Economic Report of the …
Links for August 2nd
Aloha EditorI love this HTML5 WYSIWYG editor. They had me at the introductory paragraph, what with the editing of it. I haven't implemented it anywhere, but I love the concept. Slow Clap for CongressDear Congress, For your leadership, your maturity, and your inspiring ability to perform the basic duties of your job, We applaud you. …
Links for July 25th
New York Times: Policy Changes Under Two PresidentsThis chart of new costs versus savings under Presidents Bush and Obama is really striking. The total cost of Obama's new policies comes to $1.44T. Bush's? $5.07T. Just his tax cuts alone cost more than Obama's policies, at $1.8T. Once you figure in two wars, TARP, and the …
Links for July 24th
Talking Points Memo: White House—We Thought We Were Down To The DetailsTurns out the real reason that Boehner walked out on Obama on Friday is because Boehner demanded a repeal of the individual healthcare mandate. Which, ironically, would actually have worsened things, since the individual mandate will significantly reduce federal spending. New York Times: Some …
Links for July 16th
Tabulaw: What Congress Does When it Runs Out of NumbersCongress recently passed a bill that created section 139D of the tax code. But there was already a 139D. No problem—they just kept the existing one. So there are two section 139Ds. Given my work on codes, this makes my head feel all explodey inside. New …
Links for July 12th
GitHub: nysenatecio/OpenLegislationThe New York Senate's online legislative repository is available on Github. Very impressive. Reuters: It pays to be Murdoch. Just ask US gov’t.Over the past four years, not only has News Corp. not paid income taxes, they've actually gamed the system to collect $4.8B in tax refunds. Murdoch has 152 subsidiaries spread among tax …
Links for July 9th
GAO: Replacing the $1 Note with a $1 Coin Would Provide a Financial Benefit to the GovernmentGetting rid of the $1 bill would save the government $184M/year. Not an enormous amount, on the scale of the budget, but there's no getting around that $184M is a very large amount of money indeed. Ten years ago, …